Quiet Moments
by rainbowrites
Summary: The Avengers don't get many quiet moments. But occasionally (not even once in a blue moon, once in a PURPLE moon) they get a few hours where they all find themselves at home in Avengers Tower with nothing to do. They all have their own little hobbies, those indulgences that they only allow themselves when the world holds its breath for them.


The Avengers don't get many quiet moments. If the world isn't ending (and it always seems to be, they're the world's janitors and everyone keeps throwing their evil robots and alien overlords all over the streets instead of in the trash where they belong), then they're training or on a private mission. And if you're Tony, you're avoiding paperwork, which, considering Pepper, is pretty much a full time job.

But occasionally (not even once in a blue moon, once in a _purple_ moon) they get a few hours where they all find themselves at home in Avengers Tower with nothing to do. They all have their own little hobbies, those indulgences that they only allow themselves when the world holds its breath for them.

XxX

Natasha whittles. Every time he sees it, Tony insists she does it so she has an excuse to wave around pointy objects with which to make _more_ pointy objects, and she just stares at him through her lashes until he goes to hide behind Steve.

She likes to rub her fingers over the wood, feel the art hiding beneath the grain the way she can feel a man's pulse pump their last desperate spurts of blood when she gets her hands around their neck. Natasha likes using her knife to create something. It keeps her fingers dexterous. That's what she tells Steve the first he asks her about it, when she pulls out a little nub of wood and a knife from her boot as they drive to his old training grounds.

Next to Nick Fury's grave, she kisses him on the cheek and tells him she knows what it's like to be remade. Detritus can become something new, something precious.

She carves winged animals and intricate curlicues next to the electric fireplace Tony sets up in the communal living room, the flames burnishing her with light until she looks like one of her creations. Occasionally, when they've just come back from a mission that ended up with more people dead than saved, she'll carve arrows for Clint. They'll be beautiful, with enchantments worked into the design because she may not have magic in her but that doesn't mean she's not going to try and give her teammates every advantage in the book, and a good many out of it. They'll be beautiful, but the important part is that they're deadly, and Clint treasures every one just enough to always be out of them. They're no good cluttering up his quiver after all. Plus she'd kick his ass half way around the world if she thought he held anything back for something as stupid as _sentiment._

Clint brings her wood that he scavenges around the city, and feels kind of like a cat presenting a dead mouse every time. But she'd never let Tony buy her wood, and she's too busy to go out and get some herself so need wins out. He ends up befriending a lot of carpenters. They save him bits of wood, little nubs that would otherwise be thrown out. He brings them back to Natasha so she can save them.

Clint usually sits next to her while she's carving, just close enough that they're always touching in at least one place. Usually he sits at her feet, shoulders brushing her knees. The chips fall in his hair, and he drips curls of wood on the floors for the rest of the day like he's emerging from one of her carvings. If Steve bitches about the mess, he goes and shakes it all off in Tony's bed. Not that it does much, since Tony spends six out of seven nights in the lab, passed out on the shitty little couch he keeps in there, but Clint believes that it's the thought that counts.

One day they come back to the tower to find out that Tony's replaced the sleek marble breakfast island with a mahogany table. He says that he

needed the marble to test something. None of them ask what. Experience has taught them that it's better to have some plausible deniability.

Natasha accepts the gift that it is with the softest smile he's ever seen from her. The sight makes him want to tell her _this is your home now, you weirdo, don't ever leave us_. But that would involve, ugh, feelings, and Tony can feel himself breaking out in hives at just the thought, so he just buys a matching set of chairs and pretends not to notice when she carves a beautiful arc reactor into one of them. He complains constantly about how hard wood is on his sensitive behind, complete with winks to Steve who absolutely _refuses_ to turn red, and how vastly superior the Stark Swivel Chair in his lab is, but he sits in it anyway.


End file.
